Apple Crumble

I bought a dollar pack of slightly old Granny Smith apples at the store with absolutely no plan for them. When I got home, I realized that I already had my very own forgotten Cortland apples in the back of my fruit drawer. I thought about pie, but not having a lot of counter space is not ideal for pie crust. Then, I remembered that apple crumble requires no pie crust, and would give me that delicious brown sugar, streusel crunch that I was craving!

This recipe is the result of me having three recipes up at once, as well as rummaging through my cabinets to see what things I had that I could finish using in this. Fun fact: the cup of walnuts in the topping are what was left over from a two pound bag I bought in September to make bags of trail mix for conferences!

Filling ingredients:

• 3 pounds of apples (I used 4 large Granny Smith apples and 2 large Cortland apples)

• 1/2 teaspoon of cornstarch

• 1 lemon

• 1/2 cup granulated sugar

• 1 1/2 teaspoons cinnamon

• a pinch of salt

Topping ingredients:

• 1 cup flour

• 1 cup brown sugar

• 1/2 cup oats

• 1/2 pound butter, cold

• 1 cup of walnuts

• 1 teaspoon cinnamon

Instructions:

1. Core, peel, and slice the apples. You can do this ahead of time and leave them sitting in a bowl of water with some lime or lemon squeezed in, then drain the water when you're ready to use them. I used half of the lemon in the recipe for this very purpose. (It keeps them from getting brown!)

2. Preheat the oven to 150 degrees F. Grease a 9x9 pan.

3. Whisk the cornstarch into juice from half a lemon. Then, add this and the rest of the filling ingredients to the apples and toss. Pour this into the baking pan.

4. Crush the walnuts into smaller pieces. You can put them into a plastic bag and use a rolling pin, meat tenderizer, or anything nearby with a flat bottom to do this.

5. Add everything for the filling but the butter to a bowl and mix.

6. Cut the butter into small pieces and use a pastry cutter (or your hands!) to combine until you have something that looks like crumbs.

7. Pour on top of the apples in the pan and bake until the topping is brown and the apples are bubbling: 50 - 60 minutes.

Notes on this recipe:

• There is no nutmeg (or other apple pie appropriate spices) anywhere in this recipe because I didn't have any. It would probably be a nice addition.

• There is a lot of topping to this recipe. I did that on purpose because I love it, but if you're really in it for the apples, you can probably cut the topping in half and be fine.

• The internet tells me that this is technically an apple crisp, not a crumble, since it has oats in the topping.

• I accidentally ate half an apple's worth of the filling because it was delicious, and i was fine with the number of apples I had left to bake.

Result: amazing. I'm definitely going to do this again. Plus, my apartment smelled like apples and brown sugar, which was amazing!